I. The Greeks and their Past

Abstract

Centuries before the first historian put pen to papyrus, Greek poets sang the great deeds of their ancestors. These songs have vanished and what we have is the result of a centuries-long tradition of oral poetry, two massive epics under the name of ‘Homer’, one the story of the events in the last year of the long conflict between the Greeks and the Trojans, the other a tale of wanderings and adventure, with the eventual successful homecoming of one of those heroes. The narrator of theIliadalready has a sense of history, a sense that the deeds he narrates occurred long ago, and that those who accomplished them were vastly superior to ‘the men of today’, or ‘such mortals as now live on earth’. Within the epic itself we find a receding mirror effect, since its hero Achilleus sings to himself the renowned deeds of men (κλέα άνδρών), those of an even earlier generation that the Trojan War heroes saw as great. Celebration and remembrance of great action pervade theIliad, establishing a standard against which the heroes can measure themselves and validating the sacrifice of their lives in exchange for imperishable fame (κλέος ἄϕθιтον).